13.10.4 Cancellation of AIO Operations

When one or more requests are asynchronously processed, it might be
useful in some situations to cancel a selected operation, e.g., if it
becomes obvious that the written data is no longer accurate and would
have to be overwritten soon. As an example, assume an application, which
writes data in files in a situation where new incoming data would have
to be written in a file which will be updated by an enqueued request.
The POSIX AIO implementation provides such a function, but this function
is not capable of forcing the cancellation of the request. It is up to the
implementation to decide whether it is possible to cancel the operation
or not. Therefore using this function is merely a hint.

— Function: int aio_cancel (int fildes, struct aiocb *aiocbp)

The aio_cancel function can be used to cancel one or more
outstanding requests. If the aiocbp parameter is NULL, the
function tries to cancel all of the outstanding requests which would process
the file descriptor fildes (i.e., whose aio_fildes member
is fildes). If aiocbp is not NULL, aio_cancel
attempts to cancel the specific request pointed to by aiocbp.

For requests which were successfully canceled, the normal notification
about the termination of the request should take place. I.e., depending
on the struct sigevent object which controls this, nothing
happens, a signal is sent or a thread is started. If the request cannot
be canceled, it terminates the usual way after performing the operation.

After a request is successfully canceled, a call to aio_error with
a reference to this request as the parameter will return
ECANCELED and a call to aio_return will return -1.
If the request wasn't canceled and is still running the error status is
still EINPROGRESS.

The return value of the function is AIO_CANCELED if there were
requests which haven't terminated and which were successfully canceled.
If there is one or more requests left which couldn't be canceled, the
return value is AIO_NOTCANCELED. In this case aio_error
must be used to find out which of the, perhaps multiple, requests (in
aiocbp is NULL) weren't successfully canceled. If all
requests already terminated at the time aio_cancel is called the
return value is AIO_ALLDONE.

If an error occurred during the execution of aio_cancel the
function returns -1 and sets errno to one of the following
values.

EBADF

The file descriptor fildes is not valid.

ENOSYS

aio_cancel is not implemented.

When the sources are compiled with _FILE_OFFSET_BITS == 64, this
function is in fact aio_cancel64 since the LFS interface
transparently replaces the normal implementation.

— Function: int aio_cancel64 (int fildes, struct aiocb64 *aiocbp)

This function is similar to aio_cancel with the only difference
that the argument is a reference to a variable of type struct
aiocb64.

When the sources are compiled with _FILE_OFFSET_BITS == 64, this
function is available under the name aio_cancel and so
transparently replaces the interface for small files on 32 bit
machines.